He glanced around the apartment. There was utter order to the place, as if it had never been lived in. The sign of people who knew they might have to move quickly. “Looks like you’re ready to go.”
“We can be out the door in two minutes,” Savi said, opening a closet that held suitcases, already packed. “Get your things,” she said to Sonia. “And wake your sister. She’s asleep.”
More news to Hawker. He’d never known Sonia to have a sister.
“It’s okay,” a meek voice said from the darkened hall. “I’m already up.”
Hawker turned.
A young child stood there, perhaps three feet tall. She came forward and hugged Sonia around the waist.
Hawker stared. The child wore exceptionally thick glasses. Her face was wrinkled, her hair white and thin, and her skin marked and discolored with spots.
At first, he thought it was a trick of the light or an illusion of some kind, but then she turned toward him, straightened her glasses, and smiled. Now he could see her plainly. And he found himself staring into the face of an eighty-year-old woman.
Sonia crouched down and wrapped her arms protectively around the child. “This is my sister,” she said. “Her name is Nadia. She’s eleven years old.”
CHAPTER 26
Danielle Laidlaw held on as the antique elevator shook and shimmied and descended two levels. When it stopped it opened onto a corridor of sandstone walls. A sporadically lit hall beckoned with work lights and bare bulbs along one wall. Construction equipment rested on one side; other sections were roped off.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“As we rebuild the city we find more and more of our history,” Najir said. He pointed to what looked like an excavation. “This section was once a Roman bath.”
Three men waited there, two holding guns.
“This way,” the thin man said, leading them on and following the hall to the right.
The corridor led them to a stairwell with a curved archway at the top. Old city architecture, cut from the sandstone.
“Where the hell are we going?” she asked.
The thin man stopped and turned. He glanced first at Najir but then responded to Danielle.
“The auction is down below. Forty steps. If madam cannot make it or is uncomfortable, I can inform the host that she has canceled. However, the deposit will not be returned.”
Danielle exchanged glances with Najir and then stepped through the door.
“Madam will be fine,” she said. “She just likes to know what she’s getting into.”
Their host stepped aside and held the door. Danielle went through first, with Najir following. They descended the stairs in semidarkness. Literally and figuratively they were getting in deeper, and Danielle felt less and less properly dressed for the occasion.
“We are passing through six thousand years of history,” Najir said. “Down below are the first extensive catacombs ever discovered in Beirut. Phoenicians buried their dead there, as did the Romans centuries later. Some crypts are believed to contain the bodies of Crusaders from Europe.”
“Just as long as we don’t end up buried down here ourselves,” Danielle said.
Finally the stairwell bottomed, and a few steps ahead they reached an iron gate that might have been built during the Crusades. Two men stood guard, weapons at the ready. They let Najir and Danielle pass through the gate.
“You sure about this?” she asked.
“We’re safe here,” Najir said.
During her time with the NRI she’d been through dozens of encounters and emergency situations. Her training had included survival school and other tests, the result of which was a supreme confidence in her ability to deal with any situation. But her instructors had a favorite saying, one they all seemed to repeat: The good operatives can get themselves out of any situation; the great ones avoid the situations in the first place.
As she looked at the gate and the walls and the narrow stairwell, Danielle felt herself walking into a trap, despite Najir’s confidence.
Najir nodded his agreement and the two moved out into the hall, which ran in both directions. The floor and walls were wet, and water pooled in places.
The name Beirut meant “the Wells” in ancient Phoenician, and for good reason. The city had a high water table and wells did not have to be drilled too deep to reach good, potable water. Here in the catacombs of the old city, they might have been close to that water table.
Not another soul was in view, but twenty yards farther a door beckoned. Muffled sounds were coming from beyond it. Najir knocked.
A bolt was heard sliding and then the door opened to reveal a large, brightly lit room filled with a dozen people, all dressed for the party upstairs.
The room was sandstone, like the rest of the catacombs, but swept clean. Modern track lighting illuminated the space, computer terminals were set up here and there, and a small wet bar stood in one corner. Alcoves ran off the main room in spots and another gate barred the far end. Walking in felt like entering a very private lounge.
A moment later the tall, thin man appeared, a new look in his eye. No longer the humble servant, he walked with an owner’s pride in his step. Apparently he’d entered the room some other way.
“Now that we are gathered,” he said, calling the group to attention, “please take your time and examine the items for purchase.”
With an ancient key he opened the gate at the far end and the group filed through to examine the prizes.
Danielle moved slowly, trying to make some sense of things. The first two items appeared to be Greek or Minoan masks. The small clay Gilgamesh statue was the third item in the lot and the copper scroll was fourth. A clay tablet with Sumerian writing on it and the stone head of a statue from the first Persian Empire came next.
Standing next to these items was a four-foot staff with an iron tip on one end and silver barb on the other. The spear was known as a dory; this was the weapon of a hoplite soldier from Sparta, allegedly from the Greek golden age.
The final items were writings on papyrus. They would need cleaning and restoring to be read, but if the information sheet was accurate they were written in Aramaic, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In a twist that Danielle found strange, some of the items were authenticated by newspaper reports and even insurance claims detailing their thefts from various museums and collections. All except the copper scroll.
“You see anything you like?” Najir asked.
“Not sure I like any of it,” she said. “But Bashir was interested in that scroll.”
“He called it the find of a lifetime,” Najir said.
“Why is there no authentication?” she asked.
“Either it came directly from an excavation, not uncommon, or from a private collection,” Najir said.
That sounded like a prime setup for a hoax. She studied the scroll’s description. Forty inches long and marked with raised writing, it lay curled up like a poster or a giant metallic Swiss roll. A set of photos purporting to show the script unrolled looked like they’d been taken by an amateur in bad light. The abstract data listed no place of origin and nowhere could she find any type of translation suggesting what information the scroll held.
“If no one has looked at it — no one from the archaeological world — how do we know it didn’t get hammered out in someone’s garage?”
Najir shrugged. “Caveat emptor.”
“Buyer beware.”
He nodded. “You do what you must, but as I told you, Bashir is normally a seller. He does it to raise funds for the opposition in Iran. If he was planning on spending money, it would have to be for something very important.”